If you’re a diaper manufacturer who’s upset over what your competitors are saying about you on TikTok, what recourse do you have?
Well, one option is to turn to the ad industry’s self-regulatory organization. AdExchanger managing editor Allison Schiff went down to Washington D.C. this week to attend the National Advertising Division conference, where a bunch of lawyers specializing in advertising law discuss cases that have crossed their desk. During the conference they on emerging legal issues in AI, social media and protecting kids online, and Schiff got a firsthand look at what’s worrying these lawyers.
While the copyright issues related to AI-generated images have generated much discussion, the NAD focuses most on misleading claims in advertising, and how these images could mislead consumers. So using AI to generate images of products, say a hamburger, that differs from the actual product for sale put this group of lawyers on edge.
“If you open up a bag of chips, they’re not all perfectly formed, but AI is going to create you the perfect image of chips tumbling out of a bag,” Schiff says on this week’s podcast. But faked perfection is considered misleading advertising. In the past, companies that only showed perfectly formed chips (or nuts) tumbling out of a bag have been dinged.
Commerce conversion
But many marketers, especially those working at fast-growing companies looking for ways to cut costs or grow fasters, are feeling less cautious. Our deep-in-the weeds commerce senior editor James Hercher, who has been at back-to-back commerce conferences, encountered groups of commerce founders who are eager to hand tasks off to AI. If the platforms where they buy media, like Google and Amazon, offer AI products that save time or optimization work, they will jump to use them. In contrast, many larger agencies regard these products more warily, concerned with media quality or the conflict of interest inherent in such products.
While marketers are cheerily adopting time-saving AI, Hercher observed a disillusionment elsewhere. Among a certain group of digital marketers that are hyper focused on promoting their products within a specific platform – often Amazon, Meta or Google – there’s also a growing sense that precise attribution is further away than they thought, Hercher notes during the podcast.
It’s as if they cracked open a box expecting all the answers but only found more questions inside. The more close-up a look a marketer gets at measurement or journey tracking, the more messy and imprecise attribution seems.
